Commissioners walking the walk on water

Posted: Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Catching elected officials in hypocrisy is the red meat of journalism, in part because it is, all too often, all too easy to do - so much so that it's also newsworthy these days when elected officials are caught doing something right.

Thus, a Sunday story in this newspaper - which found the overwhelming majority of Athens-Clarke County commissioners have, in fact, been doing an exemplary job of conserving water as they've been urging the rest of the community to do the same in the continuing drought - deserves some attention on the editorial page.

According to the Sunday story, nine of Athens-Clarke's 10 commissioners used less water in October than they did in the same month last year, when no water-use restrictions were in effect.

Helped out by the fact that a garage apartment at her home has been unoccupied for the past month, Commissioner Kathy Hoard's water use last month was 63 percent less than her usage in October 2006, dropping from 656 gallons per day to 252 gallons per day.

Commissioner Carl Jordan, who lives alone and was out of town for a week last month and in October 2006, recorded the lowest water usage among commissioners, at 15 gallons per day, down from 25 gallons per day last October.

All of the water-saving commissioners were in the double digits in terms of the percentage of decrease in their water usage during the two months referenced in the Sunday story, with reductions ranging from 13 percent to Hoard's aforementioned 63 percent.

The only commissioner to record an increase in usage was George Maxwell, at 29 percent. In terms of raw numbers, his usage rose 21 gallons per day, from 72 gallons in October 2006 to 93 gallons last month.

Mayor Heidi Davison's water usage rose 8 percent, from 104 gallons per day last year to 112 gallons this year. She and her husband have, however, been avidly conservation-minded, doing things such as using captured shower water to flush toilets and ordering two low-flow toilets.

Both literally and figuratively, Davison and a majority of the commissioners are not all wet when it comes to conserving water and urging others to do the same.

It's nice to know that when the mayor and commission talk the talk about the need to conserve water, residents of Athens-Clarke County can rest assured their elected officials also are walking the walk.

  

It appears that Athens-Clarke County's mayor and commission might want to extend the fiscal time horizon under which they work, moving from the current single-year budget cycle to a two-year budget. The idea was advanced at a work session last week.

Among the reasons it ought to be considered is that it would provide a reasonable time for the commission to work toward worthwhile goals such as expanding bus service and leaf-and-limb pickup, two initiatives mentioned specifically during the work session.

Less compelling, however, was Mayor Heidi Davison's observation that she and the commission are "spending so much time and energy on (the) budget every year. I think we'd like to spend our energy on other things."

Regardless of what the mayor and commission might rather be doing, watching over the county's fiscal affairs ought to be one of their primary functions. The importance of that fiscal oversight is a compelling argument for maintaining the current single-year cycle.

As they look at the possibility of establishing a two-year budget cycle, the mayor and commission need to honestly answer the question of whether going to the expanded timeline is nothing more than a convenient way of pushing off a job that's just not all that much fun.